This excerpt originally appeared in The Detroit News on June 26, 2012.

General Motors and Chrysler owed tens of billions of dollars to bondholders and trade suppliers. They also owed tens of billions to the UAW's Retiree Medical Benefit Trust. These debts were unsecured and all the creditors should have collected at the same rate. Instead, the UAW recovered most of its claims while the others got just a fraction of theirs — or got wiped out entirely. If the UAW had been treated equally, the bailout would have cost tens of billions less.